Chrome Dome

I'd forgotten how fun it is doing these freeform paintings...

Mira at 2

Decided to do a practice portrait on a whim. Here's a DS painting of my daughter Mira, the ultimate "work-in progress":

 

Some notes... As has been the case lately, I genuinely struggled to keep the painting loose, and had to backtrack a couple times. I'd find myself getting lost in trying to capture too much detail, which had the effect of flattening out the tones too much and making the image pretty bland. It's incredibly tempting to keep pushing for further detail, especially when working from a photoref; I had to let go of the urge to just straight up replicate, and worked on getting the values and overall feeling right.

It never fails to astound me how much she's grown in such a short span of time...

Sci-fi helm

I've got the digital painting urge again...

Toy Huntress

After far too long, I attended Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night. This month's model was dressed up as a "Toy Huntress", adorned with the furs of plush toy animals. A neat costume, it made for an interesting and challenging figure drawing subject. We started with some quick 5-15 minute poses, which I sketched out with Sharpie pen and gray markers:

... and then moved on to longer poses, which I painted using Colors! for DS:

As always, a pleasant time. It felt good to be drawing again, I've been soooo out of practice lately.

Colors! news

The Colors! gallery now allows paintings to be embedded, here's a test:



(Note: Clicking on the three triangles allows you to adjust the speed of the painting.) In other news, Colors! 3D for the Nintendo 3DS is nearing release via the eShop, I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

Overwrought Bot

Here's a new robot sketch painting, perhaps with a bit too many detail knickknacks, but I'll chalk it up to pushing it for the sake of learning.

I've been following a production path lately that I'm finding works pretty well for me... I'll do a painting with Colors, fairly monochromatic, and then in Photoshop I use a combination of Adjustment Layers and Layer Masks to add a little color. It's something I need to play with more, but it's promising.

Latest digital painting stuffs

It's been far too long since I've posted anything on here, but honestly, I haven't done much in the way of drawing or painting outside of work. I've had a couple of projects on my plate the last few months that have

fulfilled any digital painting urges I might have had. But with the holidays in our midst, I've got a little more time on my hands to start working on some of my own stuff again.

I just recently got a hold of a Nook Tablet, and have tried out some Android painting apps like Sketchbook Mobile and Fresco Pro with varying degrees of success -- since the Nook Tablet isn't using a full-fledged Android OS, I ran into some issues. Nonetheless, I gave it a shot. While it had a certain amount of novelty, I'm not really a fan of drawing on a capacitive screen, and I find that I'd still rather paint using the Nintendo DS, even in spite of its tiny screen. Here are a pair of doodles I did using Fresco:

Here's a piece I just did for an online contest on the toy blog TOYSREVIL, the topic being "My Fave Anime." ROBOTECH was highly influential for me, and doing my own take on one of the show's robots was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. This illo was painted in Colors! for DS and post-processed in Photoshop: